How BizCover is boosting search advertising success

The highly competitive finance and insurance sector demands brands to come up with ever-more effective marketing campaigns to get noticed amid the crowd.

Which is exactly what comparison site, BizCover, decided it was going to do with its keyword optimisation strategy. The company recently integrated Marin Software’s digital marketing solution as a way of streamlining and finding a scalable solution, and has experienced better than anticipated results.

The key issue BizCover was experiencing was doing everything manually, working across eight different products and managing keyword campaigns across each of them, head of marketing, Sharon Kenny told CMO.

“We have an extra layer of complexity because we work across 6000 different occupations,” she said. “Our biggest problem was the fact that we spent most of the time working on big volume keywords on our online SEO campaigns then spent very little time on the lower volume keywords and optimising those.

“We wouldn’t be managing those on a day-to-day basis because there were just so many of them. So really, we couldn’t get to all our campaigns as well as we wanted to on a regular basis and we weren’t managing our accounts effectively.”

Sharon Kenny

While BizCover did consider three or four competing providers, Kenny said the decision to partner with Marin was based on the vendor’s detailed level of service and ongoing support.

“Choosing the technology provider ultimately boils down to the level of support you get and right from our first meeting, Marin brought along a service account team as well, so we knew what we were in for,” she said.

According to Kenny, implementation was seamless and according to an agreed timeline, with Marin providing ongoing support and training for the marketing team.

“It worked like clockwork,” she said. “We also had weekly meetings to follow up on progress and gain any feedback or concerns.”

According to Marin Software APAC VP for customer success, Paul Korber, one of the advantages BizCover had was a marketing team very experienced in search advertising. Embracing an automated solution to assist across channels, particularly with search, meant the brand could quickly maximise the benefits like time savings and efficiency, he said.

“BizCover could also improve performance while allowing room to scale based on our approach and recommendations to use certain features of our software to meet those goals. We trained the team in-depth on the tool to ensure they were confident to drive it and execute against the core features to achieve the outcomes they were looking for.”

The results

Two-and-a-half months after implementation, the BizCover team was better able to manage its cost per lead targets while driving up volume by 9 per cent, Kenny revealed.

“We had a number of great results. The big thing was we got a lot more out of longtail keywords and ones we weren’t using and optimising before,” she explained. “And we could manage the bidding of those better with Marin’s support.”

With the extra time saved by managing accounts more effortlessly, the BizCover team could work on identifying fresh opportunities for new campaigns and further grow accounts.

“Everything was being managed well, it really freed up my team’s time to do more analysis and explore more opportunities,” Kenny said. “We now have more time to leverage all our data and can now grow the team, which has been great. The team can spend more time using the tool and developing our accounts, which have grown substantially since using Marin.”

BizCover also experienced a 22 per cent year-on-year increase in overall conversions, which has further fuelled the business to justify spending more on search. Korber attributed the results to strong collaboration along with BizCover’s leverage of Bing and Marin’s smart sync feature, which focuses on driving performance from that search engine by automating processes.

“To achieve that year-over-year for a growing business can sometimes be challenging because anything related to insurance or finance is a very competitive vertical, so the result is no small feat,” he added.

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